Working Order

After things settled down and Carbon had departed again, autosurgeon still latched on to her abdomen, Alex managed to get some sleep.

Then he woke up hungry.

Given that his injuries didn’t extend much beyond his limbs, the mediboard should have extruded a feeding tube into his nose and been squirting a food-like substance directly into his stomach. Not exactly a pleasant thing to consider, but it took care of the issue of starvation.

One Good Turn

Carbon didn’t respond to him immediately. She fished the first cannister of drugs from the dispenser tray and loaded it into an injector. She winced as she pressed it to her arm, holding it in place until it beeped empty. When she replied, her voice was ragged and tired, teeth tinged a dark red already.  “Eight hundreds. One thousands. Between.”

Alex didn’t know what unit she was using. Definitely wasn’t Gray, which would have rendered her dead a few times over. Roentgen? Could be. Probably some Tslao measurement he’d never heard of. “That’s a lot.”

Keystone

Alex didn’t find sleep quickly. He spent hours staring at the ceiling, only able to turn his eye far enough to see the clock on the wall. When he did, the dream came almost immediately.

He pushed himself up out the the cockpit of the simulator, blinking in the bright lights of the sim bay. He had a stupid sort of grin on his face, an enthusiasm that permeated the whole of his being. “If that’s what the next generation of Waverider drives is going... I can’t wait to get my hands on the real thing.”

Debtor

Alex had been pretty sure that that ‘life flashing before your eyes’ thing when you died was bunk. But, there it went. A stuttering slideshow of his life, snippets from childhood to just a few days ago flickered through his mind, the things that had made him who he was. It was interspersed with the weirdest feelings, something like comfort and gratification but decidedly foreign. At least, it felt positive.

Then all of it gave way to darkness.